Grievance Officer will be appointed soon: Twitter to Delhi HC

New Delhi: Twitter India filed an affidavit in the Delhi High Court on Sunday, saying it was in the final stage of fulfilling the statutory requirement of appointing a resident grievance officer and a chief compliance officer as per the new IT rules.

The social media giant was responding to a case filed in High Court by a user alleging that his complaint against Tweets was not acted upon promptly by the microblogging platform.

Twitter said that the interim grievance officer had withdrawn his candidature on June 21 even before steps were taken to formalise the appointment of a grievance officer in India.

In its reply, the microblogging platform said that the answering respondent is in the final stages of appointing a replacement while in the meanwhile the grievances of the Indian users are being addressed by the grievance officer.

Appointing a resident grievance officer is one of several norms which Twitter and other social media platforms operating in India have to follow under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.

Twitter's interim resident grievance officer, Dharmendra Chatur, had quit his post on June 21, following which Twitter had appointed California-based Jeremy Kessel as the new grievance officer for India.

However, Kessel's appointment was not in line with the new IT rules, as these rules mandate that all nodal officials, including the grievance redressal officer, should be based in India.

A complaint was filed against Twitter in the Delhi high court on May 28 by Amit Acharya, a practising advocate at the high court and the Supreme Court.

On May 31, a bench of Justice Rekha Palli had issued a notice to the microblogging platform, giving it three weeks' time to file its reply. The matter was posted for further hearing on July 6.

The plea moved by Acharya through advocate Akash Vajpai urged the high court to issue directions to the Centre to pass the necessary instructions to Twitter India and Twitter Inc to appoint a resident grievance officer under Rule 4 of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 without any delay.

The plea contended that in a nutshell, every significant social media intermediary has the responsibility of appointing not only a resident grievance officer who will act as a single-point authority for receiving and disposing of complaints within a fixed time, but someone will also receive and acknowledge any order, notice and direction issued by the competent authorities.